Why Childless Men and Women Give Up on Having Children.

ABSTRACT: In this paper we address the question why childless women and men aged 35 years and older, who originally were considering having children, voluntarily gave up on having children. We hypothesise that this adjustment could be attributed to five mechanisms: adaptation to a lifestyle without children; resignation because of severe hindrances to having children; approaching the end of the fecund period; perceiving a low degree of social influence from significant others to have children; and a low degree of personal persistence in pursuing life goals. We analyse data from the first six waves of the German Family Panel (Pairfam) and employ multinomial logistic regression models. As the dependent variable we distinguished four types of sequences over the observation period: "permanently consider

SUBMITTER: Buhr P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6241073 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature